


Tectonics: An Immortal's Log on New World Customs and Status Quo Contention

by Rhinocio



Series: The Homeworld T Series [5]
Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: F/F, Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-08
Updated: 2015-12-08
Packaged: 2018-05-05 17:34:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5384366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhinocio/pseuds/Rhinocio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gemkind, though uniform and austere, has always had its deviants. As in every solid planet, plates must move in order to bring change.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tectonics: An Immortal's Log on New World Customs and Status Quo Contention

There's a moment where everything fractures.

It's as if Pink Diamond can hold the shards of existence in her hands at this very moment, and feel its jagged dust cutting her chest. Glittering and cold, as a mirror. Perhaps she should have spent less time gazing into the metaphorical looking glass, and instead tilted it to refract all the other eyes upon her. The perspective may have made this moment less of a shock. She could have been numb to its revelations, or at the very least accustomed. There is much she can muse about in retrospect, but at present her cognitive processes have ground to a halt, and she has become what she, mirror in hand, had always looked down upon – stupid, plain, broken. 

For the first time in her shy one thousand years, Pink Diamond looks up into the eyes of another, not down. Fear shocks through her, as if the raw glass has bled through her projection and into her core, and she becomes weak. Despite the size of her body, all limbs thick and strong, rich in the power of a quartz, her bones grow as meek as the disposition Homeworld's sand-worms. Organic, soft, easily crushed underfoot. She stares, wide-eyed, though her jaw remains locked. Should she let it free, there is no telling the undignified sound her throat might make.

Long, pale lashes blink at her, tinged ever so slightly to the same hue as Pink Diamond's hair. They should claim as much ownership to the body they are attached as anything else, and yet, the colour seems distant. The large, glassy eyes they surround are as vivid a blue as the Alnilam star, and strikingly independent. The two gems take a breath together, reminding Pink Diamond of the bond that should be, and the offending stare flickers away.

“Sir,” the pearl murmurs, barely above a whisper. She seems so tall from such an angle. Frail, and easily swept down – Pink Diamond considers, for a moment, lashing out to break her shins, to have her topple down and join her master on the floor – and yet her rage is quiet. Everything about the smaller gem bothers her, all at once, and perhaps it is only because her mirror has shattered and left her with no way to view herself except through another. She finds the pearl ugly, despite the flourish by which she had been presented from her nacre. There is no glory in appearance here. This is well, because Pink Diamond believes her own visage may be blotchy with tears.

The pearl does not kneel.

“Do you... need?” she asks, and her voice shakes, unwilling to once again stare down, but for whatever reason adamant to remain above her master's stature. The ornamental pike in her hand glows less brightly where she grips it with spindly fingers, and her white cloth and pale armour glint almost humorously in the dim illumination. She is a façade of strength, guised in power.

Yet. Pink Diamond traces the waves of the pearl's long tunic and the gentle ridges of her aluminum pauldrons, glaring at the polished bronze inlaid as tiny triangles. Neither image does anything to protect the lithe gem; the plating would dent with as little as a tap from a civilian of higher class, and the décor implies a guardian all too indifferent to her pearl's well-being. In such a way, Pink Diamond realizes, swallowing shards of glass that burn her throat, they are similar. What insult! What wit. She, too, is shielded by the laughably feeble, and ornate with a motif that means nothing so far across the galaxy from Homeworld. 

“That is,” the pearl corrects, breath crumbling between each word, eyes scrunched tightly, “What do you require?”

Pink Diamond, for all that the movement would display in anywhere less private, lowers her head and sighs. Her arms lay heavy in the pool of her skirts, shining with mail and lace.

“Sit,” she commands, and the pearl staggers to one knee before the syllables have fully left her lips. She glances tiredly between the thick callouses of her broad palms and the delicate spindles of the pearl's, between the knobby bones jutting from the lesser gem's arms and legs to her own padded flesh. From the warm, rich tone of royalty to the pallor of its peasant class. They do not eat, but Pink Diamond feels fat with wealth. “Tell me, why do you follow me?”

“It is what we were created to do, O Diamond,” the pearl says automatically, tongue rushed on recitation, “We are grown from the nacre as a gift for another, blessed in clear purpose. We are as our gems wish us to be, soft and articulate. There is no greater honour than to be at the disposal of a leader.”

“Why is it 'we'?”

“Pearls are not of the earth as other gems, sir. We are grown as desired. To claim autonomy is to overstep the command of our masters to be secondary.” The pearl's hands are trembling on her staff, hair falling around her lips and wavering with her words. Her tresses are long, trailing down her back in a decorative braid. Blue Diamond had wasted no expense in glorifying her sister's ship and crew for her first time off-planet. It was to be an event, rewarded by a lovely right-hand servant and promise of wealth in a far away galaxy. A chance to build a name as a conqueror and creator. The ornamentation and its extravagance had long since worn off, in Pink Diamond's eyes; she wonders, perhaps, if the view has always been so ludicrous.

“Why are you secondary?”

“We-” the pearl's eyes open wide, rife with terror. 

“Answer me.”

“We d- we are unsure, O Diamond, but that is how it is.”

“What is your name?” Pink Diamond asks, turning to stare into the black night of space through the window, her head the only part of her willing to move. The universe has never seemed so large, nor she, great in her power as a gem, so miniature. Without the breath of her sisters upon her neck, or the throngs of gemkind below her steps to assure their holiness, Pink Diamond has been left uncomfortable. Her mirror had been built on assumptions; the eternity before her speaks of a different kind of worth. She is stardust among an infinity of the same.

“Pearl?” the tiny gem before her squeaks, eyes darting across the floor as if willing it to produce a menu of verbal choices. Her hand on the pike slips, wet with nervous sweat. Pink Diamond breathes slowly.

“Then tell me,” she says, watching the lazy, doomed spiral of a black hole in the distance, “What makes you a collective entity, and I a singular?”

“Y-you are a _diamond!_ ” the pearl whimpers, glancing up at her owner. Pink Diamond nods, disinterested in the information. Her left foot has begun to go numb underneath the weight of her opposite hip. Hidden, useless, and no longer of interest to the whole.

“A diamond without a backdrop of others with which to be compared. A gem of high rank with only two hundred at her command. A leader of a species whose home planet is thousands of lightyears away. Have you ever considered how little another race may think of us, Pearl?”

“We have not.”

“Do so,” Pink Diamond says, and before the smaller gem can follow her usual format of bowing and agreeing, turns to look her in the eye. The two stare at each other, silent. The energy of the room is so neutral, so unmoved – there is no contrast of strength. A pearl on her knees, a diamond on her behind; one armed with a weapon and another her words. It is no moment to compose ballads about, but something about it seems profound in its simplicity.

Pink Diamond watches the slow blink of her gem, and in it finds a new looking glass.

“My lady,” says Pearl.


End file.
